On September 26, "Hamster Fight" – a click-based mini-game claiming to have 300 million players and belonging to the TON ecosystem – officially launched its Token Airdrop event. "Hamster Fight" has created the largest Airdrop user base to date, but like other large-scale Airdrop activities, skepticism within the community is also rising. Many users reported that after months of diligent clicking, they only received Tokens worth 1 dollar, while circulated images show that a large number of obvious Bots accounts obtained huge amounts of Tokens. Are the hardworking users once again laboring just for the benefit of the project team? Behind this Airdrop frenzy involving hundreds of millions of participants, who are the real winners?

The average airdrop amount is only $3; the "witch attack" prevention rules have come under scrutiny.
With the massive expansion of the user base, Airdrop distribution has become the biggest challenge faced by "Hamster Fight." Previously, large-scale Airdrop events like Jupiter and Zksync had user numbers in the millions, with very few exceeding ten million. Especially for a project like "Hamster Fight," there was no mechanism designed to prevent "Sybil attacks" in the early stages, and many "mining" studios also participated. If the detection mechanism for "Sybil attacks" fails, it could harm the interests of a large number of real users. According to the results, the official claim for "Hamster Fight" is that there are 300 million users, but only 131 million users qualify for the Airdrop, with about 2.3 million "Sybil" addresses identified.
The total supply of HMSTR Token is 100 billion, of which 60% is used for this Airdrop, totaling 60 billion Tokens. With 130 million users, the average airdrop amount per user is about 458 Tokens, valued at approximately 3.2 dollars based on a unit price of 0.07 dollars.
Looking at the data, HMSTR has a market cap of about $440 million, which is lower than the $640 million of the Dog/s token and the initial market cap of $1 billion of the NOT token. This suggests that although Hamster Fight has more than 100 million users, its market value is not getting an additional premium. On the contrary, due to the ongoing delays in airdrops and token listings, as well as the launch of several on-demand products in the TON ecosystem, the market's interest in similar products has decreased. As a result, the value of the tokens distributed to each user is relatively low.
Naturally, the community is complaining about this outcome. A user vented on Twitter that he participated for 109 days and ultimately received tokens worth about 17 dollars, which need to be unlocked in batches. He concluded, "Maybe I don't care much about this Airdrop, but you should at least respect people's hard work. This is really unfair, and your reputation will really suffer."
A player nicknamed Timbo stated that he has been involved since the very beginning of the game, spending about 4 to 5 hours a day for two consecutive months, and ultimately earned only about 500 Tokens (worth just 3.5 dollars).
Project team, TON blockchain and exchange: the biggest winners?
Apart from users, the project team, exchange, and TON blockchain are the biggest winners in this large-scale Airdrop event.
According to data from the TON blockchain, since September, the number of addresses on the TON blockchain has increased by 30 million, an increase of about 50%. In addition, the TON Foundation recently announced through its official channels that the number of monthly active wallets for TON has reached 10 million, setting a new historical high.
The exponential growth of the TON ecosystem is mainly driven by the popularity of several mini-games. At the beginning of June, the number of addresses was only 27 million. According to a report by Ancoin, as of September 12, the number of connections to the TON wallet for "Hamster Fight" reached 55 million.
The large user base is likely to generate significant advertising revenue for Hamster Fight. Currently, Hamster Fight has about 60 million subscribers on its Telegram channel, about 37.6 million subscribers on its YouTube account, and 14.2 million followers on Twitter. Such a huge amount of traffic is a monetizable asset on any platform. The official Telegram channel of Hamster Fighting has been accepting ads for a long time. Based on Telegram's minimum CPM of €2, this ad alone should have earned at least €100,000, considering that the most recent Hamster Fight ad received 50 million views. Not to mention, the Hamster Fight channel pushes ads almost every day, so ad revenue can reach tens of millions of dollars.
In addition to the project team and the TON ecosystem, the Airdrop event of "Hamster Fight" has also sparked a competition among exchanges similar to the early DOGS event. In this battle for funds and traffic, An has become the biggest winner.
As of September 27, the HMSTR Token held in the An address accounts for about 18%, the highest proportion among major exchanges, followed closely by Bitt and Yic. According to CoitCap data, HMSTR's trading volume in the past 24 hours exceeded $1 billion, ranking 12th among all tokens globally. An's trading volume accounts for nearly half, making it the largest trading market after the HMSTR Airdrop. However, it is currently unclear how many new users "Hamster Fight" has brought to these exchanges. Previously, the founder Zhou Ben predicted in an interview with Wu said Blockchain that the user acquisition effect of "Hamster Fight" may begin to weaken. On-chain data shows that the number of addresses holding HMSTR Token is only 214,000.
Looking back at its growth journey: leveraging gameplay and clever strategies to top the global subscription list.
The success of "Hamster Fight" is an atypical case. In March 2023, without any investment news or clear support, "Hamster Fight" created a channel on Telegram and launched the game. PANews was the first media outlet in the Chinese community to report on this game; by May of this year, when PANews noticed it, there was almost no discussion about it on Twitter. At that time, influenced by Notcoin, several clicker-type mini-games appeared in the TON ecosystem, all gaining decent attention thanks to Not's traffic guidance, and "Hamster Fight" was one of them. Other mini-games that became popular around the same time as "Hamster Fight" include Tapswap and Catizen.
In May, "Hamster Fight" had 15 million users, although it was not as many as Tapswap's 20 million users, but its Telegram channel had already become the third largest in the world. In the following months, "Hamster Fight" claimed its user base reached 300 million, and currently, its Telegram channel has 69 million subscribers, ranking first in the world.
Looking back at the reasons for the popularity of "Hamster Fight", it is likely due to its outstanding playability. Unlike other click-based games, although "Hamster Fight" also requires clicking to accumulate game coins, the main gameplay shifts to using in-game virtual currency to simulate investment as the game progresses. Essentially, "Hamster Fight" is a virtual management game that starts with clicking, which makes it more appealing than its competitors.
Another reason for its rapid growth is the team's savvy traffic acquisition strategy. The game mechanics of "Hamster Fight" also introduced a way to earn points by inviting friends and following social media accounts. The difference is that "Hamster Fight" launched a daily news program, where daily large reward codes are hidden in these programs. Players need to watch videos or search the comment section on social media to find these codes. This not only quickly increased the number of fans for "Hamster Fight" on social media but also gained a large amount of genuine viewership.
As a result, it gained more recommendations from the social media platform's algorithm, which may have played a key role in the subsequent monetization of traffic for "Hamster Fight."
Overall, the success of "Hamster Fight" has opened up new ideas for many project teams. Instead of attracting users through large-scale fundraising combined with Airdrop strategies, they established a traffic base through the playability of the game and the expectations of Airdrops, maximizing the retention of this traffic as monetizable assets (such as various social media accounts). However, compared to the past where users could easily gain thousands of dollars from Airdrops, this "everyone shares the thin profit" approach has not won the favor of Airdrop hunters. The golden age of Airdrop feasts may be gone for good.